1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to electronic documents and in particular to copying electronic documents on computer systems. Still more particularly, the present invention relates to a method and system for automatically providing bibliographical information during the copying of an electronic document.
2. Description of the Related Art
Creating non-fictional works, such as research documents, that include information, facts, or data from other sources often requires the compiler of the work to acknowledge or give credit to the source(s) from which the information is obtained. It is also a legal requirement under copyright laws for scholars and other copiers/compilers to provide bibliographical information when they compile content from other sources in order to acknowledge the correct source (or author) of the information and to allow interested readers to quickly locate and access the source(s).
Traditionally, copied/cited content was obtained from a written source, (e.g., book, magazine, or thesis) and the compiler had to painstakingly locate and record the bibliographical information accompanying the content to avoid being discredited for plagiarism or even worse, being sued for copyright infringement. In today's Internet-connected environment, a vast majority of information required for creating non-fictional works and/or compiling content for a research project or paper can be found on the Internet. Millions of people surf the Internet each day looking for specific content that is available on web pages composed by a web page editor. Of these surfers, a substantial number occasionally copy portions of the content from the web site and paste that information into a different location/application, such as a word processing editor.
When copying/pasting from the Internet, particularly when doing research, the copier (similar to the compiler) often cites the online sources used. As with the traditional research methods, conventional Internet-based research requires the copier of the content to manually locate/retrieve and record the bibliographical information (to the extent the information is available on the web site). Several limitations are built into conventional online research and content retrieval/transfer from a web page to a word processing editor application. First, the bibliographical information may not be actually provided with the content and the copier may be limited to citing the web page URL (Universal Resource Locator) rather than the actual source/author of the information and publication date, etc. Second, even if the information was displayed along with the content, the copier is forced to actually copy/type that information into his document being created on the word processing editor, which necessarily involves some manual effort and “academic” honesty of the copier. Often, the copier takes the lazy approach and simply records the web page URL or omits the bibliographical information all together.
The present invention recognizes these limitations and provides a method, system, and computer program product that enable automatic retrieval and transfer of bibliographical information whenever content is copied from a web page.